Ernst Junger, Contradictory German Author Who Wrote About War, Is Dead at 102

By DAVID BINDER

Published: February 18, 1998

Ernst Junger, an aloof warrior-author regarded as one of Germany's most controversial and contradictory writers, died yesterday in Wilflingen, in southwestern Germany, where he had lived for nearly 50 years. He was 102.

Mr. Junger was so well regarded that Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Roman Herzog defied snow and freezing spring winds to attend his 100th birthday in Wilflingen, a village in Upper Swabia. But he also was so disliked that at the same time he was being extolled as a master stylist, he was being denounced by others as a warmonger and Nazi apologist.

For Mr. Junger, war and writing were often indivisible. At 19 he volunteered for army duty the day Kaiser Wilhelm ordered mobilization that led to World War I in August 1914. Soon he was at the Western front with the 73d Fusiliers.

Regimental histories spoke repeatedly of his daring and valor. He was wounded for the first time in April 1915 in Lorraine and was subsequently wounded at least six more times. In 1917 he was awarded the Knights Cross of the House of Hohenzollern, and eight months later, his commanding general, commenting on his ''ruthless bravery,'' secured for him imperial Germany's highest medal, the Pour le Merite. He was believed to have been the last man alive to hold the imperial medal.

Mr. Junger published his first work, ''Stahlgewittern'' (''Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front.''), privately in 1920; subsequent editions became a commercial and critical success and appeared in other countries. Based on the diaries he kept in the trenches from 1915 through 1918, ''Stahlgewittern'' is a memorial to fallen comrades and an attempt to make sense of his war experiences, but it also revels in the glory of combat.

Many critics in Germany and abroad praised Mr. Junger's work because it did not censor events or thoughts but presented them as they occurred. His subsequent books included ''Combat as an Internal Experience,'' ''Storm,'' ''The Copse'' and ''Fire and Blood.'' These books, filled with what one critic later called ''bombastic pathos,'' made him the darling of nascent radical nationalist movements, including Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party. Indeed, Mr. Junger contributed an article in 1923 to its newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, advocating revolutionary nationalism and a dictatorship.

But he declined to join the Nazis, gravitating instead to other extremist fringe groups, ranging from the right-wing Stahlhelm to the left-wing National Bolshevists. Despite this, some literary historians regard him as primarily a loner who paid homage to an aristocratic ideal and was imbued with a kind of Germanic fatalism. Like earlier German writers, among them Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hebbel, he was fascinated with death and heroism. He was influenced by the nihilist streak of Friedrich Nietzsche, the end-of-the-world ideas of Oswald Spengler and the formalistic philosophy of Hegel.

His writings in the 1920's, with their attacks on bourgeois culture and ''civility,'' played into the prejudices of the Nazis. But he rebuffed repeated wooing by Hitler's party, refusing the offer of a seat in the Reichstag in 1927 and, after Hitler seized power in 1933, membership in the Nazified German Academy.

A frequent criticism of Mr. Junger was that he registered events only at a cool distance, never passing judgment or injecting an emotional note. ''The more the panic grows,'' he wrote, ''the more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror.''

Writing on the occasion of Mr. Junger's 100th birthday, the historian Joachim Fest said it was frustrating to try to discern the difference between Mr. Junger's early and later writing because his style prevented the reader from discovering what moved him, frightened him or allowed him to hope. He described this style as ''an odd mixture of elevatedness, precision and the rudiments of a German out of the General Staff schooled in Spartan brevity.''

A passage from his novella ''On the Marble Cliffs'' may serve as a sample: ''Fish scales gleamed, a gull wing cut through the salt air, jellyfish stretched and loosened their umbrellas, the fronds of a coconut palm waved in the wind, oysters opened to the light. In the sea garden the brown and green seaweed and purple forms of the water lilies swayed. The fine crystal sand of dunes whirled up.''

The ''Marble Cliffs,'' published in the year World War II began, became a seminal Junger work, pitting a high-minded teacher against the ''senior forester,'' a brutal and demonic totalitarian who is hungry for power. The forester orders his underlings to strip the bones out of human corpses and to tan their skins. In the end, the hero escapes, saying, ''So I swear to myself in the future to fall alone in freedom rather than to accompany the servants on the path to triumph.''

The book was quickly recognized as anti-Nazi, but no steps were taken against the author, who was back in uniform, loyally serving the Third Reich.